Cub Sport’s remix takes Jack River’s ‘Ballroom’ to the club

The visuals for JACK RIVER’S latest single, ‘Ballroom’, imagined a glitter-strewn ballroom scene as a neon-soaked, technicolour slice of utopia where dancers revelled in their free selves. The track itself, all huge, gated 80’s snares, cascading synth arpeggios and an indelible hook, came basically ready-made for a club-crossover remix. On their reworking of River’s single, Brisbane four-piece CUB SPORT take the track out of this imagined ballroom and place it very firmly in the centre of a modern nightclub.

Cub Sport heighten the sense of romanticism found at the heart of River’s original, chopping up her vocal performance and rearranging it into layers of distorted vocal loops of, “I just want to be alone with you,” and, “There is nowhere to go from here.” The remix, which is anchored by the repetition of these loops as much as it is the irresistible 80s snares which are retained from the original, is topped with an airy, twinkling countermelody and some swelling synths that sound as if they could’ve been pulled straight from LORDE’s Melodrama LP.

Like any good remix, the Cub Sport remix of Jack River’s ‘Ballroom’ never loses sight of the original, reworking and remodelling the components of the original track, ratcheting up certain elements and dialling down others to draw something new and previously unheard out of the track to create Cub Sport’s own vision of a pop utopia.

Jack River’s debut Sugar Mountain is out June 22nd via Mushroom – you can pre-order it here.